North Korean leader Kim Jong Un speaks during a ceremony to award party and state commendations to nuclear scientists, technicians, soldier-builders, workers and officials for their contribution to what North Korea said was a successful hydrogen bomb test, at the meeting hall of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) in this undated photo released January 13, 2016. REUTERS/KCNA

World War III: North Korea Threatens to Wipe Out United States

An official North Korean website warned Monday that Pyongyang will “wipe out” the United States if Washington starts a war on the peninsula, the latest tit-for-tat sabre-rattling that has sent tensions soaring in the region, AFP reports.

According to Vice President Mike Pence, the US supercarrier Carl Vinson will arrive in waters off the Korean peninsula “in a matter of days” amid reports the North could be preparing a sixth nuclear test.

Pyongyang is still believed to be far from reaching its aim of building a missile capable of reaching the US mainland, but the secretive nation has ramped up its rhetoric in recent weeks and has carried out two rocket tests this month alone.

In a series of editorials the Rodong Sinmun newspaper — the official mouthpiece of the ruling Workers’ Party — said the North’s forces were undeterred and called the US strike group’s imminent arrival “undisguised military blackmail”.

“Such threat may startle a jellyfish, but can never work on the DPRK,” it said Monday, using the country’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

A day earlier it said the North’s revolutionary forces were “combat-ready to sink the US nuclear aircraft carrier with a single strike”. Pyongyang’s rhetoric intensifies every spring, when the US and South Korea hold joint exercises it sees as rehearsals for an attack on the North.

A separate editorial on the North’s propaganda website Uriminzokkiri Monday claimed that the dispatching of the Carl Vinson signalled a war: “It is proof that an invasion of the North is nearing day by day.”

The editorial, described as being written by an army officer, said it was a “big miscalculation” for Washington to compare the North to Syria, which did not launch an “immediate counterattack” after a US cruise missile strike earlier this month.

In the event of an attack, it said, “The world will witness how Washington’s rash nuclear aircraft carriers are turned into a huge pile of steel and buried at sea and how a country called America is wiped out from the Earth.”